The Internet has grown in popularity largely due to its ability to exchange data in a uniform and simple manner. The internet transfers TCP/IP packets so that the networking hardware infrastructure for accomplishing packet transfers has minimal impact on the data carried by the packets. Thus, a wide variety and diversity of underlying hardware and software infrastructure will support data transfers over the Internet with TCP/IP packets. However, the simplified nature of the internet's transfer of data with packets makes specific control of data flows difficult to accomplish since the packets generally do not carry specific handling instructions for infrastructure to use. The lack of control instructions in internet packets tends to make the internet less flexible for applications that have specific data transfer requirements, such as services for providing voice and video flows.
To address the use of specific applications across the internet, industry has proposed a variety of quality of service standards. The quality of service standards provide a basis for identifying packets of data so that the packets can be handled through network infrastructure to achieve desired data transfer parameters. For instance, data packets associated with a quality of service may be identified by a layer 1 digital subscriber line (DSL) quality of service parameter for handling by DSL infrastructure, a layer 2 asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) quality of service parameter for handling by ATM infrastructure, or a layer 3 internet protocol (IP) quality of service parameter for handling by IP infrastructure. In each instance, the underlying infrastructure handles data packets to achieve a predetermined quality of service that is typically associated with applications, such as voice over IP or video streaming.
One difficulty with using quality of service parameters is that each infrastructure layer is typically limited to handling quality of service parameters associated with that layer and thus is typically unable to provide quality of service for data packets having quality of service parameters in other layers. Thus, a network that provisions a service may assign packet flows to a layer 2 or layer 3 quality of service that bears no relation to a provisioned layer 1 quality of service. This tends to result in non-optimized quality of service and may in fact degrade services provisioned in the layer 2 or layer 3 infrastructure.